Columbia University's Washington Post Company/`Newsweek' Link & `Newsweek' Magazine's Historical CIA Connection--Part 7

Columbia University President Lee Bollinger (http://youtube.com/watch?v=g0JpF07SOo4 ) currently sits between RAND Corporation Board of Trustees Chairman Ronald Olson and Coca-Cola Company board member Barry Diller on the Washington Post Company media conglomerate’s board of directors. Following is the final part of an article about the Washington Post Company and Newsweek magazine’s hidden history which first appeared in the February 17, 1993 issue of the now-defunct Lower East Side alternative newspaper, Downtown:

Newsweek Magazine’s Historical CIA Connection—Part 7

During the first 12 years that the Meyer-Graham Dynasty’s Washington Post Company owned Newsweek, “no women were hired at Newsweek as writers,” according to Up From The Footnote: A History of Women Journalists by Marion Marzolf. The same book also noted that in March 1970, 46 of Newsweek’s women researchers and reporters “charged that magazine with a violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”

As late as the 1990s, Newsweek still didn’t appear that eager to promote many women to its top positions. Newsweek’s editor-in-chief, its president, its editor and its managing editor were all still men, as were most of its senior editors and contributing editors, its director of photography, its director of administration, its operations director and its picture editor.

Coincidentally, after the Women’s Action Committee [WAC] printed a one-page parody of Newsweek’s “Conventional Wisdom” section, one of Newsweek’s corporate lawyers “sent a threatening letter to Mary Dorman, the lawyer for the Women’s Action Coalition,” according to Jim Windolf of the New York Observer.

The Washington Post was also not too quick to end job discrimination in its editorial offices. Although well over 50 percent of Washington, D.C.’s residents were African-American in the early 1970s, only 37 of the Washington Post’s 396 newsroom employees were African-American in 1972. In response to this institutional racism, seven of its African-American employees filed a discrimination complaint against the Washington Post with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission [EEOC] and “The EEOC’s local office issued a finding of discrimination on the basis of race,” according to The `Washington Post’: The First 100 Years. In 1986, the Washington Post was also accused of publishing a racist article in its Sunday magazine and “hundreds of demonstrators…massed in front of the Post, dumped copies of the magazine and demanded an end to its publication,” according to The Press by Ellis Cose.

The Washington Post was also accused of institutional sexism. In 1974, for instance, the newspaper was “charged in an EEOC finding with discrimination against women particularly in promotion opportunities,” and, as late as 1976, only 20 percent of all of its newsroom employees were women, according to The`Washington Post’: The First 100 Years. As late as July 14, 1988, the Wall Street Journal reported that the “Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild has accused The Washington Post of discriminating against employees on the basis of race, sex, age and national origin.”

Although the Washington Post Company hired replacement workers when it busted one of its Washington Post newspaper unions during a 1975-76 strike, during the early 1990s it was quite generous when it came to paying out salaries to its top management. Washington Post Company Director Richard Simmons, for instance, took home an annual salary of about $506,000 in the early 1990s. A Washington Post Company Division president named Howard Wall was paid an annual salary of about $423,000 in the early 1990s, while a baby-boom generation executive vice-president of the Washington Post Company named Alan Spoon was being paid an annual salary of $405,000 by the early 1990s.

Members of the Meyer-Graham Dynasty were also not shy during the early 1990s about paying themselves hefty salaries from their family business, in addition to receiving dividends from their company stock. The now-deceased former Chairman of the Board, Katharine Meyer-Graham, for instance, paid herself an annual salary of $554,986 in the early 1990s. And her son—current Washington Post Company Chairman of the Board and Columbia University Pulitzer Prize Board Member Donald Graham—was paid an annual salary exceeding $324,996 for being the media conglomerate’s president and chief executive office during the early 1990s.

Although Newsweek often claims to be against censorship, a strange thing happened, ironically, after the first edition of Katharine The Great by Deborah Davis was published in 1979. Six weeks after its release by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, that company’s president, William Jovanovich, “withdrew the book from bookstores and ordered all remaining copies shredded” so that 20,000 copies of the book were converted into waste paper. Volume 129 of Contemporary Authors noted that it was widely believed at the time “that the withdrawal of Davis’s book was the result of pressure from the executives of the Washington Post, led by Graham herself.” A second edition of Katharine The Great was only allowed to be published in 1987 by a different publisher after author Davis sued Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in 1982 for breach of contract and an out-of-court settlement was reached. (end of article)

(Downtown 2/17/93)

Next: Patrick Dowd’s Song lyrics

Columbia University's Washington Post Company/`Newsweek' Link & `Newsweek' Magazine's Historical CIA Connection--Part 6

Columbia University President Lee Bollinger currently sits between RAND Corporation Board of Trustees Chairman Ronald Olson and Coca-Cola Company board member Barry Diller on the Washington Post Company media conglomerate’s board of directors. Following is the sixth part of an article about the Washington Post Company and Newsweek magazine’s hidden history which first appeared in the February 17, 1993 issue of the now-defunct Lower East Side alternative newspaper, Downtown:

Newsweek Magazine’s Historical CIA Connection—Part 6

In 1987, Katharine Meyer-Graham and her four children owned about 28 percent of Washington Post Company stock—which was worth about $660 million—as well as all of the company’s class A stock, which enabled the Meyer-Graham Dynasty to continue to elect the majority of the Washington Post Company’s board of directors. In October 1987, Fortune magazine estimated that the combined worth of Eugene Meyer’s daughter, Katharine Meyer-Graham, and his grandson, Columbia Pulitzer Prize Board Member Donald Meyer-Graham, exceeded $1.1 billion.

In the early 1990s, Eugene Meyer’s daughter still owned about 41 percent of the Washington Post/Newsweek media conglomerate’s class A stock and still had the exclusive right to vote over 9 percent in additional class A stock, still giving her the right to elect the majority of the media conglomerate’s corporate board. About 800,000 copies of the Washington Post newspaper were being circulated by the Meyer-Graham Dynasty’s company each day during the early 1990s.

The half-brother of former Newsweek Owner Philip Graham—Bob Graham—sat in the U.S. Senate as a senator from Florida from 1987 until early in the 21st-century. Prior to entering the U.S. Senate, Bob Graham graduated from Harvard Law School in 1962, inherited several million dollars, “took on executive positions in the family’s business enterprises, including cattle holding and dairy farms in Florida and Georgia,” and increased his inherited wealth through real estate investing between 1963 and 1979, as vice-president of his family’s Sengra Development Corporation of Miami Lakes, according to Current Biography Yearbook 1986.

At the same time, Graham also involved himself in Florida Democratic Party politics and sat in the Florida state legislature from 1967 until 1979, before moving into Florida’s governor’s mansion. As Florida’s Democratic Governor between 1979 and 1987, former Newsweek Owner Philip Graham’s half-brother nominated former U.S. President Jimmy Carter at the 1980 Democratic National Convention, signed more than 130 death warrants for people who were sentenced to die on Florida’s electric chair and—along with 2008 Democratic Party presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s husband, Bill Clinton—established the pro-corporate Democratic Leadership Council in the 1980s, before taking a U.S. Senate seat in 1987.

Although Newsweek poses on the newsstand in Minneapolis and St. Paul as a publication which competes with the Minneapolis Star & Tribune newspaper, in the early 1990s Newsweek’s parent company also owned 28 percent of the stock of the Cowles Communications company which owned the Minneapolis Star & Tribune in the early 1990s.

One reason you didn’t hear much satirical talk about Newsweek’s historical CIA connections, its Washington Post parent company or the Meyer-Graham Dynasty on your TV screen during the early 1990s, was that the now-Columbia University-linked Washington Post/Newsweek media conglomerate was also involved in the world of television broadcasting during the early 1990s. The Post-Newsweek Stations Inc. subsidiary of the Meyer-Graham Dynasty’s Washington Post Company was the 22nd-largest U.S. broadcasting company, in terms of U.S. households reached, at that time. Through its ownership of four television stations—the ABC-affiliated WPLG-TV in Miami, the NBC-affiliated WDIV-TV in Detroit, the CBS-affiliated WJXT-TV-Jacksonville and the WFSB-TV-Hartford/New Haven in the early 1990s—the Post-Newsweek Stations subsidiary of the Washington Post Company reached nearly 5 percent of all U.S. households. Around 20 percent of all Washington Post media conglomerate income came from its Post-Newsweek Stations TV broadcasting subsidiary during the early 1990s.

One reason why you didn’t find much satirical reporting about the cultural quality of the U.S. military-industrial-media complex’s “alternative” U.S. cable-tv programming in the pages of Newsweek during the early 1990s was that the Washington Post Company’s Post-Newsweek Cable subsidiary operated 53 pay-tv cable systems in the United States during the early 1990s.

Around 451,000 U.S. households subscribed to a Post-Newsweek Cable pay-tv system in the 15 Midwestern, Southern and Western states in which Newsweek affiliates did business in the early 1990s under the following names: 1. Post Newsweek Cable of Oklahoma; 2. Post Newsweek Pacific Cable; 3. Post Newsweek Cable of North Dakota; 4. Post Newsweek Cable of Indiana; 5. Post Newsweek Cable of California; 6. Omnicom Cablevision of Illinois: 7. Mark Cablevision of Green Inc.; 8. Coastal Bend Cablevision; 9. Sandoval County Cable Television; and 10. Bisbee Cable TV. The Washington Post Company also owned about 1/3 of Sports Channel’s ventures in New York, Philadelphia and Chicago during the early 1990s. And Newsweek’s parent company owned a majority interest in Scotland’s Tayside Cable Systems, Kingdom Cablevision Limited and Scotcable-Motherwell Limited in the early 1990s. (end of part 6)

(Downtown 2/17/93)

Next: Columbia University’s Washington Post Company/Newsweek Link and Newsweek Magazine’s Historical CIA Connection—Part 7 (Discrimination Historically At Newsweek and the Washington Post)

Columbia University's Washington Post Company/`Newsweek' Link & `Newsweek' Magazine's Historical CIA Connection--Part 5

Columbia University President Lee Bollinger currently sits between RAND Corporation Board of Trustees Chairman Ronald Olson and Coca-Cola Company board member Barry Diller on the Washington Post Company media conglomerate’s board of directors. Following is the fifth part of an article about the Washington Post Company and Newsweek magazine’s hidden history which first appeared in the February 17, 1993 issue of the now-defunct Lower East Side alternative newspaper, Downtown:

Newsweek Magazine’s Historical CIA Connection—Part 5

In 1929, the founder of Allied Chemical Corporation—a multi-millionaire Republican Wall Street investment banker named Eugene Meyer—had made a secret offer to purchase the Washington Post for $5 million. But Ned McLean, despite his mental condition, was able to block the sale of the Washington Post to Meyer at that time.

On June 13, 1933, however, the Washington Post announced that the 57-year-old Meyer had bought the Washington Post at a June 3, 1933 auction for $825,000—although “on June 4, 1933 the [Washington] Star carried a denial to the AP in New York that he was the purchaser,” according to The `Washington Post’: The First 100 Years. The same book also noted that “by 1915 Meyer’s fortune was in the $50 to $60 million range,” “dealings in railroads, copper, oil and chemicals swelled his fortune; he was the chief organizer of the giant Allied Chemical and Dye Corporation, the dividends of which helped finance The [Washington] Post,” and “he made millions with the Fisher auto body brothers.” Since 1933, the Washington Post has been owned by the Meyer-Graham Dynasty.

Eugene Meyer was born in 1875 in California, the son of Marc Meyer—who “directed all West Coast investments” of the international Lazard Freres investment banking firm’s “London, Paris and American banks and relished the international banker’s life,” according to Katharine The Great by Deborah Davis. Following the financial panic of 1893, Eugene Meyer’s father was transferred to Lazard Freres’ Lower Manhattan office and the Meyer family moved into an East 72nd St. townhouse in Manhattan.

After graduating from Yale University in 1895, Eugene Meyer began to play the stock market with money provided by his father, by investing in lucrative railroad stock like Northern Pacific, at the same time he worked for his father’s Lazard Freres investment banking firm. By 1901, Meyer’s railroad stock was worth about $50,000 and he sold the stock, purchased a New York Stock Exchange seat for $50,000, left the Lazard Freres firm and—at the age of 26—began to work full-time as a Wall Street stockbroker. He then took advantage of a business clash between J.P. Morgan and former Newsweek stockholder Averell Harriman’s father [E.H. Harriman] for control of some railroad companies to acquire $500,000 more in stock-dealing profits. Utilizing this $500,000, he next started his own brokerage firm—Eugene Meyer and Company—in 1903.

During the next 30 years, Meyer married the original New York Sun’s first woman reporter—Agnes Elizabeth Ernst—in 1910, moved into his own townhouse with her on East 70th St. and Park Ave., and paid for dresses which cost $1,000 apiece, a $60,000 string of pearls from Tiffany and a $24,000 diamond necklace for his wife. He also set up a large fund of money for the personal use of the grandmother of Washington Post Company Chairman of the Board and Columbia Pulitzer Prize Board member Donald Graham. The father of Katharine Meyer-Graham and grandfather of Donald Graham also became involved with the creation of Allied Chemical Corporation and Anaconda Copper around this time, and both companies profited enormously from World War I.

Meyer’s Anaconda supplied the Allied military with copper wire for their communications network and Meyer’s Allied Chemical supplied all the blue dye for U.S. Navy uniforms. By the time Eugene Meyer purchased the Washington Post, his Allied Chemical stock investment alone was worth around $43 million.

In accumulating his fortune prior to entering the world of U.S. Establishment journalism in 1933, Eugene Meyer had profited enormously from the economic panic of 1907 (which left 36 percent of all U.S. skilled workers unemployed), had become a key figure in the copper industry, with investments in Utah Copper, Chile Copper and Inspiration Copper, and had aligned himself with the seven Guggenheim brothers of the Guggenheim Dynasty that controlled $1 billion worth of Los Angeles Times-Mirror-Newsday stock during the 1980s. Around the time Meyer was aligned with Guggenheim corporate interests, the Guggenheim Trust was responsible for much destruction of the earth. As Downtown noted in its March 6, 1991 issue:

“In The Guggenheims: 1848-1988 book, John Davis described some of the environmental effects of the Guggenheim family’s late 19th-century and early 20th-century business activity:

“`Piles of debris and broken rocks, and heaps of slags are all that remain of former Guggenheim operations in Colorado. In Bingham Canyon, Utah, where the Guggenheims created the world’s first open-pit copper mine, there is now a vast devastation, the earth so gouged and lacerated as to seem the scene of some cosmic disaster. Kennecott: an entire mountain destroyed in Alaska. Chuquicamata: an entire mountain destroyed in Chile. Rivers everywhere contaminated with the detritus of Guggenheim mines and smelters.’”

Since Meyer was both a business associate of the Guggenheim Dynasty and an investor in competing Anaconda’s Inspiration Copper subsidiary, he was able to end a 1910 price war between Guggenheim corporate interests and Anaconda corporate interests and get them to agree to limit copper production and raise their prices, although such a price-fixing scheme was “clearly illegal under American law,” according to Katharine The Great.

After purchasing the money-losing Washington Post in 1933, Meyer “quickly arranged his property so that the losses of the Post could be played off against the taxable income from his other investments” until the Washington Post became a profitable operation again over 20 years later, according to The Powers That Be by David Halberstam.

In addition to accumulating his Allied Chemical stock, the Washington Post and additional U.S. corporate stock, Eugene Meyer also accumulated a number of expensive houses during the 20th Century, such as a house on Crescent Place in Washington, D.C. which was worth $1 ½ million in 1948 and a mansion on his estate in Mt. Kisco, New York.

After World War II, Meyer sold all the voting stock of his Washington Post Company to his daughter, Katharine Graham-Meyer, and his son-in-law, Philip Graham, for $1 in 1948. And before his death in 1959, Meyer passed on most of his non-voting company stock to his four other children. (end of part 5)

(Downtown 2/17/93)

Next: Columbia University’s Washington Post Company/Newsweek Link and Newsweek Magazine’s Historical CIA Connection—Part 6 (The Meyer-Graham Dynasty Era)

Columbia University's Washington Post Company/`Newsweek' Link & `Newsweek' Magazine's Historical CIA Connection--Part 4

Columbia University President Lee Bollinger currently sits between RAND Corporation Board of Trustees Chairman Ronald Olson and Coca-Cola Company board member Barry Diller on the Washington Post Company media conglomerate’s board of directors. Following is the fourth part of an article about the Washington Post Company and Newsweek magazine’s hidden history which first appeared in the February 17, 1993 issue of the now-defunct Lower East Side alternative newspaper, Downtown:

Newsweek Magazine’s Historical CIA Connection—Part 4

The Washington Post was founded in 1877 by a former Northern Democratic supporter of the Confederacy named Stillson Hutchins, with the help of a Mississippi Democrat and former Confederate officer named Lucius Q.C. Lamar, according to The `Washington Post’: The First 100 Years by Chalmers Roberts. The same book also noted that “Hutchins set up shop in the capital because he knew that a Washington newspaper could command the daily attention of men of power in all branches of the national government” and that “Hutchins backed the return to white supremacy in the old Confederacy.”

After the pace at which white supremacy was restored in the old Confederacy accelerated during the 1880s, Hutchins sold the Washington Post in 1889 for $210,000 and concentrated on marketing the linotype machines of his National Typographic Company and on his real estate investments in the 1890s. By the time he died in 1912, the founder of the Washington Post had accumulated a fortune of $4 to 5 million, consisting mostly of real estate.

Between 1889 and 1894, ownership of the Washington Post was shared by a former U.S. Postmaster General in the Republican administration of Chester Arthur and founder of the original New York Press newspaper named Frank Hatton and a Democratic Congressional Representative named Beriah Wilkins. Under the shared ownership of Hatton and Wilkins over a century ago, the Washington Post made annual profits of around $100,000.

After former Washington Post Owner Hatton died of a stroke in 1894, Wilkins became the sole owner of the Washington Post until he also died of a stroke in 1905. Following Wilkins’ death, his son sold 320 of the Washington Post’s 600 shares of stock for $556,000 to a Cincinnati newspaper publisher and former Democratic candidate for Governor of Ohio named John McLean. Between 1905 and 1933, the Washington Post was controlled by representatives of the McLean Dynasty.

John McLean’s father—William McLean—was a manufacturer of steamboats who purchased control of the Cincinnati Enquirer newspaper in 1857 before passing his stake of this big money-making Ohio newspaper on to John McLean in 1880. Four years after inheriting the Cincinnati Enquirer, John McLean moved to Washington, D.C. to join its local business Establishment while continuing to supervise his newspaper in Ohio.

By 1892, John McLean was president of the Washington Gas Light Company and, after purchasing control of the Washington Post in 1905, “he co-founded the Washington and Old Dominion Railway in 1911 and was a director and large stockholder in both the American Security & Trust Company and the Riggs National Bank,” according to The `Washington Post’: The First 100 Years. And by the time John McLean died in 1916, this former Washington Post owner had accumulated around $7 million worth of property: the Cincinnati Enquirer newspaper that was worth $3 million; the Washington Post newspaper; $2.7 million worth of U.S. corporate stock; $880,000 worth of bonds; $129,000 worth of jewelry; and only $47 worth of books.

In addition to being into money and property accumulation, former Washington Post Owner John McLean was also into influencing U.S. Establishment politics. He “exercised power with his money and his newspapers” and “for years he bankrolled the Democratic party in Ohio and through his Cincinnati Enquirer influenced his party and state,” according to The `Washington Post’: The First 100 Years.

After John McLean’s son—Ned McLean—inherited his father’s 320 shares of Washington Post stock in 1916, he purchased the 280 remaining shares of newspaper stock that former Washington Post Owner Beriah Wilkins’ son still owned for $469,000, giving the McLean Dynasty representatives 100 percent ownership of the Washington Post between 1916 and 1933.

Like the Washington Post in the 1990s and 21st-century, the Washington Post under the ownership of Ned McLean in the 1920s was not considered that great a newspaper by many people. As The `Washington Post’: The First 100 Years recalled:

“For the most part Ned McLean’s `Post’ was a shallow paper, devoid of any intellectual or artistic ferment, content to chronicle the obvious and that usually in a superficial way. In-depth reporting was a rarity…In the final McLean years there was little anticipatory sense of the gathering storms of fascism abroad and economic woes at home.”

Under Ned McLean’s ownership, the Washington Post supported the Democratic Wilson administration’s decision to enter World War I, supported the domestic repression of U.S. dissident anti-war writers and activists and boosted a corrupt politician named Warren Harding for U.S. president in 1920. When the U.S. Congress began to investigate the Teapot Dome scandal of the 1920s in which a Republican Harding Administration cabinet official leased government-owned land to a U.S. oil company in exchange for a $100,000 bribe, former Washington Post Owner Ned McLean “was caught in a lie trying to cover up a Teapot Dome conspiracy” and “The Teapot Dome scandal…deeply involved The Post,” according to The `Washington Post’: The First 100 Years.

During the 1920s, Ned McLean also began to squander his inherited fortune and flip-out mentally, at the same time the Washington Post turned into a big money-losing operation. In 1929, McLean was put in a Maryland mental hospital and removed as the Washington Post publisher. The American Security Bank, in which the McLean Dynasty had invested heavily, was named to act as trustee for the unprofitable Washington Post. Then, in March 1933, the 50,000-circulation Washington Post was forced into bankruptcy when it couldn’t pay the newsprint bills it owed to the International Paper Company. And in 1941, former Washington Post Owner Ned McLean died in a mental hospital. (end of part 4)

(Downtown 2/17/93)

Next: Columbia University’s Washington Post Company/Newsweek Link and Newsweek Magazine’s Historical CIA Connection—Part 5 (The Meyer-Graham Dynasty Era)

Columbia University's Washington Post Company/`Newsweek' Link & `Newsweek' Magazine's Historical CIA Connection--Part 3

Columbia University President Lee Bollinger currently sits between RAND Corporation Board of Trustees Chairman Ronald Olson and Coca-Cola Company board member Barry Diller on the Washington Post Company media conglomerate’s board of directors. Following is the third part of an article about the Washington Post Company and Newsweek magazine’s hidden history which first appeared in the February 17, 1993 issue of the now-defunct Lower East Side alternative newspaper, Downtown:

Newsweek Magazine’s Historical CIA Connection—Part 3

Newsweek magazine was launched in 1933 by a group of U.S. Establishment stockholders “which included Ward Cheney, of the Cheney silk family, John Hay Whitney, and Paul Mellon, son of Andrew W. Mellon,” according to America’s 60 Families by Ferdinand Lundberg. The same book also noted in 1946 that “Paul Mellon’s ownership in Newsweek apparently” represented “the first attempt of the Mellon family to function journalistically on a national scale.”

To launch Newsweek the group of original owners invested around $2.5 million. Other large Newsweek stockholders prior to 1946 were a public utilities investment banker named Stanley Childs and a Wall Street corporate lawyer and director of various corporations named Wilton Lloyd-Smith.

In 1937, Newsweek merged with the weekly journal—Today—that had been founded in 1932 by a representative of the Harriman Dynasty—former Democratic New York Governor and diplomat Averell Harriman—and a representative of the Astor Dynasty—Vincent Astor. As a result of the 1937 Newsweek-Today merger deal, Harriman and Astor provided Newsweek with $600,000 in additional venture capital funds and Vincent Astor became both Newsweek’s chairman of the board and its principal stockholder between 1937 and his death in 1959. At the time of his death, Astor owned around 120,000 shares of Newsweek’s 179,700 shares of stock and Harriman owned about 40,000 shares of Newsweek stock.

Prior to purchasing control of Newsweek, Astor had inherited a fortune at the age of 21 which included $63 million worth of real estate, such as the Waldorf-Astoria, the Hotel Astor, the St. Regis, Astor Place, and offices and apartment buildings in Manhattan. During the 1920s, former Newsweek Owner Astor “sold about half of the family’s real estate holdings in New York City for $40 million.” Yet, “during his lifetime he succeeded in doubling his inheritance through a program of careful diversification” so that by the time he died the estate which he left the Vincent Astor Foundation had an estimated value of $123 million, according to The National Encyclopedia.

In addition to utilizing his inherited Establishment wealth to subsidize the publication of Newsweek between 1937 and 1959, Astor also “built drilling barges for off-shore oil development, invested in oil ventures in the Southwest,” was a director of American Express, Western Union, Chase National Bank, and railroad companies like Great Northern and the Illinois Central, and was the largest shareholder and a director of the United States Line shipping company, according to the same book. Former Newsweek Owner Astor also was Commodore of the New York Yacht Club for nine years and contributed his money to both Democratic and Republican Party election campaign chests.

The 1961 deal that Ben Bradlee set up, which enabled the Meyer-Graham Dynasty’s Washington Post Company to purchase Newsweek from the Vincent Astor Foundation and former Democratic New York Governor Harriman, was arranged and financed in such a way that David Halberstam described it as “one of the great steals of contemporary journalism” in his book The Powers That Be. The same book noted that, although the official 1961 selling price for Newsweek was $15 million, “in the end no more than $75,000 really changed hands.” For arranging the deal that brought Newsweek into the Washington Post media conglomerate’s stable, Bradlee received a finder’s fee.

At the time it was purchased by the Washington Post Company, Newsweek’s circulation was around 1.3 million per week and, within 10 years, its weekly circulation had jumped to 2.5 million. The only other U.S. weekly news magazine with a higher circulation in the early 1970s was Time magazine. By the late 1980s Newsweek’s weekly circulation in the U.S.A. was around 3.1 million—still higher than the circulation of Mort Zuckerman’s U.S. News & World Report but still lower than Time-Warner’s Time magazine. Around 730,000 copies of English-language international editions of Newsweek were also circulated each week in the British Isles, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, Japan, South Korea and Southeast Asia.

Of Newsweek’s 295 full-time editorial staff members in the early 1990s, around 200 worked at Newsweek’s Midtown Manhattan offices in the Newsweek Building at 444 Madison Avenue, where Newsweek then rented skyscraper office space on 18 floors.

Over $225 million worth of ad space was sold by Newsweek each year during the early 1990s. And from the operation of its Newsweek subsidiary, the Washington Post Company took in over $325 million in annual revenues in the early 1990s—around 50 percent of what it took in from operating its Washington Post newspaper subsidiary. About 10 percent of all Washington Post media conglomerate income came from its Newsweek magazine subsidiary operation during the early 1990s.

Given its connection to the Washington Post Company for over 46 years, it’s not too likely that Newsweek magazine will be any more eager in the 21st-century to print many satirical or critical articles about either the Meyer-Graham Dynasty, Ben Bradlee or the Washington Post newspaper than it will be to print satirical or critical articles about the university over which Washington Post Company board member Lee Bollinger currently presides. (end of part 3)
(Downtown 2/17/93)

Next: Columbia University’s Washington Post Company/Newsweek Link and Newsweek Magazine’s Historical CIA Connection—Part 4

Columbia University's Washington Post Company/`Newsweek' Link & `Newsweek' Magazine's Historical CIA Connection--Part 2

Columbia University President Lee Bollinger currently sits between RAND Corporation Board of Trustees Chairman Ronald Olson and Coca-Cola Company board member Barry Diller on the Washington Post Company media conglomerate’s board of directors. And Washington Post Company Chairman of the Board, Donald Graham, also sits next to Columbia University President Bollinger on the Columbia University School of Journalism’s Pulitzer Prize Board.

So don’t expect the Washington Post Company’s weekly news magazine, Newsweek, to put a photograph of any Columbia or Barnard student anti-war activists on its cover in September 2007, like it did once in September 1968.

Following is the second part of an article about the Washington Post Company and Newsweek magazine’s hidden history which first appeared in the February 17, 1993 issue of the now-defunct Lower East Side alternative newspaper, Downtown:

Newsweek Magazine’s Historical CIA Connection—Part 2

Former Newsweek Owner Philip Graham was the son of a Florida state senator and real estate developer, the half-brother of former U.S. Senator Bob Graham of Florida, the husband of the now-deceased former Washington Post Company chairman of the board Katharine Meyer Graham, and the father of the current Washington Post Company chairman of the board (and a current member of Columbia University’s Pulitzer Prize Board)—Donald Meyer-Graham.

After marrying the daughter of Washington Post publisher Eugene Meyer in 1940, Philip Graham spent part of World War II in attendance at the Army Intelligence School in Harrisburg, PA. Following World War II, Graham’s father-in-law named him publisher and editor-in-chief of the Washington Post at the age of 30. And in the Summer of 1946, Graham’s father-in-law provided him and Katharine Meyer-Graham with the money to make a down payment on a house in Washington, D.C. that had belonged to one of the men most responsible for creating the Central Intelligence Agency [CIA]—former Office of Strategic Services [OSS] Director “Wild Bill” Donovan.

Top CIA officials like Frank Wisner, Richard Helms, Desmond Fitzgerald and Allen Dulles were also entertained socially by Philip Graham and Katharine Meyer-Graham during the late 1940s and 1950s. CIA Covert Action Chief Frank Wisner and former Newsweek Owner Philip Graham apparently conceived of the CIA’s secret Operation MOCKINGBIRD program to recruit and use journalists for CIA covert action program support. As a result of the Operation MOCKINGBIRD program, Katharine The Great noted that “by the early 1950s, the CIA `owned’ respected members of the New York Times, Newsweek, CBS, and other communications vehicles, plus stringers, 400 to 600 in all, according to a former CIA analyst.”

The same book also revealed that “Over a period of months, at the Graham salon and other meeting places, as a former Agency man who attended those meetings recalls, Wisner discussed with him [Philip Graham] which journalists were for sale and what price (`You could get a journalist cheaper than good call girl,’ the former Agency man says, `for a couple hundred dollars a month’) on how to handle them, where to place them, and what sorts of stories to produce;” and “Phil [Graham] recommended target reporters for jobs with other newspapers.” The “former Agency man” also told the author of Katharine the Great that since the Washington Post couldn’t afford to hire foreign correspondents in the days when it was still a money-losing operation, the CIA paid for the foreign trips of Washington Post reporters in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

Within four years after Philip Graham’s Washington Post media conglomerate acquired Newsweek, the two men who conceived of the CIA’s “Operation MOCKINGBIRD” mass media program—Frank Wisner and Philip Graham—had both committed suicide. According to Katharine The Great, prior to shooting himself in August 1963, Philip Graham had begun to talk “about the CIA’s manipulation of journalists,” “said it disturbed him,” “said it to the CIA,” and “turned against the newsmen and politicians whose code was mutual trust and strangely silence” so that “now the word was that Phil Graham could not be trusted.” At a June 1963 newspaperman’s convention in Phoenix, for instance, Newsweek Owner Philip Graham had “appeared in the banquet room during a speech, grabbed the microphone and announced to the crowd…that he was going to tell them exactly who in Washington was sleeping with whom, beginning with President Kennedy” whose “favorite…was now Mary Meyer, who had been married to CIA official Cord Meyer…and was the sister of Ben Bradley’s wife,” according to Katharine The Great. One Establishment newsman then telephoned JFK, while other Establishment newsmen apparently hustled Graham back to his motel to be injected with a sedative and rushed to the Phoenix Airport in an ambulance, prior to being institutionalized. (end of part 2).
(Downtown 2/17/93)

Next: Columbia University’s Washington Post Company/Newsweek Link and Newsweek Magazine’s Historical CIA Connection—Part 3

Columbia University's Washington Post Company/`Newsweek' Link & `Newsweek' Magazine's Historical CIA Connection--Part 1

Columbia University President Lee Bollinger currently sits between RAND Corporation Board of Trustees Chairman Ronald Olson and Coca-Cola Company board member Barry Diller on the Washington Post Company media conglomerate’s board of directors. Yet, as I noted in a June 1, 2007 blog posting:

“The RAND Corporation think-tank was recently given a $210.6 million `cost-reimbursement plus fee-for need contract' by the U.S. Air Force `to provide for RAND Project Air Force,' which produces studies and analyses for the U.S. war machine. Coincidentally, Donald Rumsfeld was a Trustee of the RAND Corporation from 1977-1987, 1988-1998, and 1999-2001, before serving as the Bush Administration’s Secretary of Defense between 2001 and 2006.”

And the Coca-Cola Company is also currently the target of an anti-corporate boycott campaign (http://www.killercoke.org/) because of its apparent involvement in human rights violations in Colombia and elsewhere around the globe.

Washington Post Company Chairman of the Board, Donald Graham, also sits next to Columbia University President Bollinger on the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism’s Pulitzer Prize Board. So don’t expect the Washington Post Company’s weekly news magazine, Newsweek, to put a photograph of any Columbia or Barnard student anti-war activists on its cover in September 2007, like it did once in September 1968.

Following is the first part of an article about the Washington Post Company and Newsweek magazine’s hidden history which originally appeared in the February 17, 1993 issue of the now-defunct Lower East Side alternative newspaper, Downtown:

Newsweek Magazine’s Historical CIA Connection—Part 1

Downtown telephoned Newsweek magazine’s switchboard in February 1993 and asked to speak to a press spokesperson for the magazine. Newsweek’s switchboard receptionist then connected Downtown to the answering machine of a Newsweek media writer named Josh Hammer, and Downtown asked Hammer for an official comment on whether Newsweek has ever acted as a tool of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency since 1948 and whether there’s ever been any CIA connection to Newsweek?

“I’ve got nothing to tell you. It’s a ridiculous question, to begin with. And, second of all, I’m a media writer here and I have no idea why you asked me that question in the first place…But I can tell you it’s a ridiculous question. There’s been no involvement here with the CIA. And I don’t know why you’re suppositioning that,” the Newsweek media writer replied when he returned Downtown’s telephone call.

Yet in his 1983 book, The Imperial Post: The Meyers, The Grahams and The Paper That Rules Washington, Tom Kelly wrote the following:

“Newsweek did have a CIA connection. One CIA agent who worked in Paris…recalls that agents were told quietly that purposeful stories, true or false, could always be planted in the `Periscope’ column.”

Although Newsweek magazine likes to pose as an independent, politically liberal newsweekly, the Central Intelligence Agency connections with Newsweek and its Washington Post newspaper parent company have apparently been extensive since the late 1940s.

Newsweek’s European correrspondent in Paris between 1953 and 1957 was Ben Bradlee. After 1957, Bradlee worked for Newsweek’s Washington Bureau as a reporter, until he was named to be Newsweek’s Washington Bureau Chief in 1961. By 1965, Bradlee was also a Newsweek Senior Editor. Between 1965 and 1991, Bradlee was the managing editor or executive editor of the Washington Post newspaper of Newsweek’s parent company. During the 1990s, Bradlee sat on the board of directors and was a vice-president of the Washington Post Company.

Bradlee has denied any past connections to the CIA. But during the 1980s, former Village Voice writer Deborah Davis came into possession of a set of revealing Justice Department documents. According to the second edition of Davis’s book, Katharine The Great: Katharine Graham and `The Washington Post’, “the documents show” that in the early 1950s, “Mr. Bradlee went to the Rosenberg prosecutors in New York under orders of `the head of the CIA in Paris,’ as he told an assistant prosecutor, and that from their material he composed his `Operations Memorandum’ on the case, which was the basis of all propaganda subsequently sent out to foreign journalists.”

The grandfather of former CIA Director Richard McGarrah Helms—an international financier named Gates White McGarrah—“was a member of the board of directors of the Astor Foundation which owned Newsweek” prior to its sale to the Washington Post Company in 1961, according to Katharine The Great. The same book also revealed that in 1961 Bradlee “is said to have heard from his friend Richard Helms, who heard it from his grandfather that Newsweek would be put up for sale.” Bradlee then obtained a check from the Washington Post Company head at that time, Philip Graham, for $1 million, to give to former CIA Director Helms’s grandfather as a down payment for the purchase of Newsweek.

At the urging of former Newsweek Washington Bureau Chief Bradlee in the mid-1960s, the Washington Post published “the Penkovsky papers, a CIA concoction which had been offered through a legitimate publisher as the authentic revelation of a Soviet double agent,” according to The Imperial Post: The Meyers, The Grahams and The Paper That Rules Washington.

A former wife of CIA European Covert Operations Chief Cord Meyer—Mary Pinchot-Meyer—was the sister-in-law of Bradlee between 1956 and Pinchot-Meyer’s mysterious death in 1964.

Katharine The Great also contends that when Bradlee was the Washington Post’s executive editor during the early 1970s, he directed the investigation which pressured President Nixon to resign in 1974 because “the leaders of the intelligence community” wanted “the president of the U.S. to fall.” Katharine The Great also asserted that “there is no doubt that the use of the Washington Post to take down Nixon was both a counter-intelligence operation of the highest order and the dirty trick par excellence.”

During the 1950s—even before it became a subsidiary of the Washington Post Company—Newsweek had “connections to intelligence,” according to Katharine The Great.

The CIA covertly set up Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty to broadcast CIA propaganda to Eastern Europe and Russia in 1950. In 1976, the former vice-president for radio and television of Newsweek’s parent company—John Hayes—was named to be the chairman of the Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty board of directors.

During the early 1960s, “a secret CIA task force” was set up “to explore methods of beaming American propaganda broadcasts to China,” according to Katharine The Great. The Newsweek-affiliated John Hayes was “named to this secret CIA task force,” as was former CBS News president Richard Salant, now-Schumann Foundation President Bill Moyers, the ex-husband of Ben Bradlee’s sister-in-law [Cord Meyer], CIA Chief of Station in Ethiopia Paul Henze and former Columbia University Professor Zbigniew Brzezinski ("who had been on the agency payroll for several years”), according to Deborah Davis’ Katharine The Great book.

Prior to adding Newsweek to his company’s stable of media properties in 1961, the Washington Post’s publisher from 1946 to 1963—Philip Graham—worked closely with CIA officials. According to Katharine The Great, in a 1977 Rolling Stone magazine article, Carl Bernstein reported “that Agency officials…thought of Philip Graham as `somebody you could get help from,’ meaning he helped arrange journalistic cover for agents.” Graham was also “one of the architects of a now widespread practice, the use and manipulation of journalists by the CIA;” and “individual relations with intelligence had in fact been the reason that the Post Company had grown as fast as it did after the war” since “Philip Graham’s commitment to intelligence had given his friends Frank Wisner and Allen Dulles an interest in helping to make the Washington Post the dominant news vehicle in Washington, which they had done by assisting with its two most crucial acquisitions, the [Washington] Times-Herald and WTOP-TV radio and television stations,” according to Katharine The Great [WTOP-radio was later sold and WTOP-TV was later exchanged in the 1970s by the Washington Post Company, for other media properties]. (end of part 1)
(Downtown 2/17/93)

Next: Columbia University’s Washington Post Company/Newsweek Link and Newsweek Magazine’s Historical CIA Connection—Part 2